Alternate SR Campaigns, Less is More Options

[Ancient History]

Some people I know have bashed SR for not being a system around which a setting may be hung, like GURPS or d20.

I and I say this reflects a distinct lack of imagination. So presented here are alternate campaign options. New style lovin' because the old school is old.

Manapunk
In this campaign option, every character must be a magician, because everyone in the Sixth World is a magician. Yeah, there are still cybermonsters crawling around - but most of those are burn outs pitied (or feared!) by the populace. Magic isn't rare, it's so damn common that it's not even worth mentioning.

Naturally, the Big Bads in this game are the top of the heap, magic-wise: wizworms, immortal vampire cabalists, dark tower corporate wizards and the biggest, nastiest spirits you can imagine.

Cyberpunk
No magic. None. Metahumans? Mutants. Dragons are incredibly intelligent overgrown lizards, but they can't cast spells. All those disasters? Ecological devestation. In this campaign, chrome is king, and your regular humans are /out/.

Cyberzombies are the product of ultratech - the whole "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" route - and these bad boys make the wizworms cack their britches.

Matrixpunk
Everyone is an avatar in the Matrix, and the Matrix is all the world you have. Far, far away you might have a physical body - but you can't get to it, so it doesn't matter. Life and death are the stakes in this game as you struggle for influence against fellow hackers, knowbots, ghosts in the machine, and the malign forces of the artificial intelligence. Face down the viral infection and score the data, or you'll be moved to the history file, chummer!

The standard setting is an ultraviolet host mimicing the world you know. But if you delve up a couple levels you enter the Matrix, realms of the software deities and mad programming god-children that crafted the world you know. It's behind the scenes with only your proggies and your wits to keep you alive.

Slipstream
The future is now. There is no cyberware, there is no way to "Jack in" to the Matrix, there is no magic. The gadgets are cool, but at the end of the day it's you and your skills that get the job done. No metahumans, no mutant critters.

As gritty and realistic as you want it to be, welcome to a future where man is never more than they are, and "the Matrix" is a fancy name for the internet of next half of the 21st century. Your enemies might be draconian, ghoulish, evil, and insane - but they're all human, and so are you.

Necropunk
You just missed the end of the world. The epic battle of good and evil. Guess who won?

Metahumanity have reverted to barbarianism as the hungry dead stalk the blasted waste that was the Earth. The Infected spread their plague to entire cities and now nations bow before them, enslaved. Dark lords unleash their terrible legions against their foes: the shedim, insect spirits, and wave after wave of loathsome corpse cadvare legions from the Voudoun Lords. Aztlaner blood-priests commit attrocities and genocides to summon their lord to eat the sun and destroy the world. The tattered remnants living in the shadows barter their skills as hardened mercenaries...their only creed "Live free or die."

[Zen Shooter01]

Um, well, okay... :|

One of the reasons I've always loved SR is the fantastic size of the 6th world, the variety of settings. It's a million games in one.

For a long time I ran a campaign where the PCs were special agents for Ares Macrotechnology, traveling all over the world on secret missions. Penetrating the ruins of Tripoli to terminate a toxic mage, digging an Ares executive out after he barricaded himself in his Detroit office after SURGEing overnight, fighting a war for influence on the streets of Boston to make sure that an Ares-friendly mayor won the next election, or driving into the winter mountains of upstate New York to put a brilliant grad student under contract before Saeder-Krupp did.

I did a campaign where the PCs were natives of Needles, in the Mojave Desert, struggling to survive between the PCC, the weather, paranormal creatures, and the bad men and law breakers who made the desert their home.

I did a campaign where the PCs were good Catholics and outside assets for the Vatican, in a shadow war with the intelligence/wetwork assets of the New Islamic Jihad.

The campaign I'm putting together now has the PCs as gentlemen of fortune in Saigon, freelancers in the fetid jungle and the debauched streets.

Granted you'd need to work with some 3rd ed. sourcebooks for some of this, but there's mob wars in New York, rivalries of zaibatsu honor in Neo-Tokyo, Lovecraftian happenings in underwater arcologies, piracy in the South Pacific, shamanic rivalries in the Canadian Rockies, and the endless night of the gravity well.

You don't need to remodel the Sixth World one little bit to have endlessly varied adventures.

[Velocity]

[SL James]

[Kyoto Kid]

Cthulu punk

Your purpose is to investigate the various horrors because they are actually behind those who run the megacorps.

You actually do not want to cast spells if you can help it, particularly those that you find in spell libraries of the places you infiltrate.

80% of the time you are better off running away instead of fighting a horror.

Nukes only make many of them madder & irradiated (Particularly Cthulu himself)

The more you learn about the mythos, the more insane you become. (kinda like normal shadowrunning I guess).

Eventually your character either gets carted off to a nice quiet padded room at the asylum or winds up dead (which could be the better of the two).

Hmmm...Maybe shouldn't have brought up Celtic Double Cross in the "Runs Gone Bad" thread

[Lucifer]

I've seen Shadowrun used, surprisingly well, to represent the setting of Final Fantasy 7. There were very few modifications needed, mostly in the area of magic.

The actual game wasn't so great, because the setting was used up and the story was tired, but the rules worked perfectly well for what they were trying to represent.

I myself have used Shadowrun with moderate modifications to run a Buffy-type 'modern day with monsters and comic book high-tech' setting.

[eidolon]

[Straight Razor]

I am just about to start an new game. It is 6th world right out of the books, but i've made all the players make shapeshifters, of the same animal(wolf most likely) with 126 points (3rd ed). I'm starting them in a back ally with no money and no gear. It'll be a fight for survivel. I'll give them a hard time have every one and the brother wanting there head.

[PBTHHHHT]

here's another suggestion:

Heropunk

The runners are now superheroes who fight the forces of evil. Mainly, the magic casters and adepts will reflect the variety of superhero powers. Totems and summoning and the astral stuff are tossed out, unless the hero is an actual spiritualist/actual mage. But the rest of the heroes with powers not stemming from tech are more like adepts or spellcasting only adepts who's power is more limited to a few 'spells' (abilities).

Ok, the thought needs more tweaking, but hey, there's my .02 :nuyen:

[PlatonicPimp]

I've also just used the magic/adept rules and arious other things to run a simle fantasy campaign. The idea was that everyone who wasn't a full mage was an adept, even if they didn't know it. That was what mage them heroes, and better than the peasants.

I've also used just the basics of the system (Third Ed) with no magical aspects, cyberware or matrix as the rules for a game based on grand theft auto.

[Roadspike]

I ran a campaign based in the Aliens universe for a short period of time. The PCs were mundane, non-cybered humans--Colonial Marines--and had to depend on their skills and smarts to beat out first a group of terrorists, and then xenomorphs. Surprisingly enough, despite some extremely close calls and some brutal Alien encounters, none of the PCs went down, but they sure were scared.

[Phase]

Post Apocalypse

Mad Max, Fallout, Battle Angel Alita, etc... type campaign world.

Civilization has destroyed itself and most of the world is now a wasteland. Anarchy and the rule of the strong is the order of the day. Technology is mostly recycled stuff and hard to come by.

There are a few protected "high tech" areas but they tend to guard themselves fiercly and don't allow outsiders access.

Magic has become hard because of the background count in most area and for those without prior skill almost impossible to learn due to a lack of magic libraries (available ones anyway).



I was planning to have one of my campaigns move in this direction. Players were going to be put in suspended animation (not voluntarily) and when they wake up again the world has changed...

If I remember correctly it was around the time I was getting sick of GMing after years of doing it, so it never happened. :(

Still maybe I'll run with the idea some day.